Leo Szilard

“ What is the significance of these gadgets, the disks in the gadgets and the word "Liberty" on the disks? Though a number of hypotheses have been put forward in explanation, consensus seems to veer toward the view that we have to deal here with a ceremonial act accompanying the act of deposition, similar perhaps to some of the curious ceremonial acts reported from the planets Sigma 25 and Sigma 43. According to this view, the word "Liberty" must designate some virtue which was held in high esteem by the earth-dwellers or else their ancestors. ”

“ Since the earth-dwellers who built all these cities must have been rational beings, it is difficult to believe that they should have gone to all this trouble of processing uranium just in order to destroy themselves. ”

“ Xram, as I mentioned before, has a theory of his own which he thinks can explain everything, the disks in the gadgets as well as the uranium explosions which extinguished life.
He believes that these disks were given out to earth-dwellers as rewards for services. He says that the earthdwellers were not rational beings and that they would not have collaborated in co-operative enterprises without some special incentive. ”

“ We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender. ”

“ Apparently, he has made some elaborate calculations which show that a system of production and distribution of goods based on a system of exchanging disks cannot be stable but is necessarily subject to great fluctuations vaguely reminiscent of the manic-depressive cycles of the insane. He goes as far as to say that in such a depressive phase war becomes psychologically possible even within the same species. ”

“ It is, however, possible that the earth-dwellers located the depositories with aid of olfactory guidance, and we have determined that if their sense of smell had been about thirty to forty times more sensitive than the rudimentary sense of smell of our own species, the average time required would be reduced from one hour to about five or ten minutes. ”